Privacy is one of the problems of our time—it concerns more or less everyone. Privacy means, roughly, very roughly, that we are all entitled to go about our business without the rest of the world—and, in particular, agencies linked to the organs of power—knowing what we’re doing. There are of course institutions that try to protect privacy. And so it’s all the more worrying that it’s possible out there to discover through our credit cards what we’ve been buying, which hotel we’ve stayed at, and where we’ve dined. The same is true with telephone tapping, except in cases where it’s essential for identifying criminals; indeed, Vodafone has recently warned that agents from every country can find out more or less secretly whom we are telephoning and what we are saying.
Privacy therefore seems a right that each of us should want to defend at all costs, to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in a world of Big Brother, the real Big Brother, where the universal eye can monitor all that we do or even think.
But the question is whether people are really concerned about privacy. At one time the threat to privacy came from gossip. The fear of gossip, or the washing of dirty linen in public, came from the impact it had on our public reputation. But perhaps in the so-called liquid society, where people suffer from lack of identity and values, and have no points of reference, the only means for obtaining social recognition is through “being seen” at all costs.
And so a woman today who goes out and sells herself, who at one time would have tried to keep her vocation hidden from her family and neighbors perhaps by describing herself as an “escort,” happily performs her role in public and even appears on television; the couples who once jealously guarded their differences now take part in trash broadcasts, telling everyone about their adultery and unfaithfulness, to public applause; on the train, our neighbor yells into his cell phone about what he thinks of his sister-in-law and what his tax consultant ought to be doing; those under criminal investigation, instead of withdrawing to the countryside until the wave of scandal has died down, now generally prefer to appear in public with a smile on their face, since it’s better to be a dishonest celebrity than an honest nonentity.
A recent article by Zygmunt Bauman in La Repubblica reported that the social networks (especially Facebook), instruments for keeping an eye on other people’s thoughts and emotions, are being used by the organs of power, but with the enthusiastic endorsement of those taking part. Bauman also talks about a “confessional society, promoting public self-exposure to the rank of the prime and easiest available, as well as arguably the most potent and only truly proficient proof of social existence.” In other words, for the first time in the history of mankind, those who are being spied upon are helping the spies to make their work easier, and gain satisfaction from being observed as they live, even if at times they are behaving like criminals or idiots.
It is also true that, as soon as everyone is capable of knowing everything about everyone, and everyone identifies with the sum of the inhabitants of the planet, the excess of information can produce only confusion, noise, and silence. But this ought to worry the spies, whereas those being spied upon think it’s a good thing that their friends, their neighbors, and perhaps their enemies know their most intimate secrets, as this is the only way they feel themselves to be a living and active part of the social body.
2014